Stephen Miller Demanded ICE Target Home Depots

[justaprogressive]

President Trump’s dream of mass deportations has always suffered from logistical and practical obstacles that make the entire exercise part cruelty, part performance, and part salve of his fragile ego.

It falls to White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller to keep all the plates spinning, a role he happily embraces, but which comes with the inherent challenge of putting the “mass” in mass deportations.

And so it was that ICE officials found themselves being berated by Miller in late May that their arrest numbers weren’t high enough and the rhetorical focus on the worst of the worst needed to shift on the ground to focus on all undocumented immigrants, the WSJ reports:

Agents didn’t need to develop target lists of immigrants suspected of being in the U.S. illegally, a longstanding practice, Miller said. Instead, he directed them to target Home Depot, where day laborers typically gather for hire, or 7-Eleven convenience stores. Miller bet that he and a handful of agents could go out on the streets of Washington, D.C., and arrest 30 people right away.

That kind of indiscriminate enforcement action has had the effect of sweeping up documented and undocumented, citizen and noncitizen, workers and criminals in a Kafkaesque crackdown that was sure to enflame tensions in immigrant and minority communities that were hardest hit.

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/morning-memo/stephen-miller-demanded-ice-target-home-depots